Bombs Away Read online

  The cadet is taught slowrolls and other acrobatic maneuvers

  This was the elementary flying school, and when they finished each student had sixty hours in the air—twenty-nine hours with an instructor and thirty-one hours of solo flying. They had flown by instruments and they had flown at night and each cadet had learned to navigate his plane and learned the traffic rules which are standard everywhere. They had been nine weeks at the school and in that time they had begun to be real flyers. At least they felt like pilots and probably they were the only men in the Air Force who thought they were. They talked flying and dreamed flying. Actually their work was only starting, they were just out of kindergarten. From primary school they would go to basic school, there to have many more hours in the air and much more theory.

  In basic school they would learn about radio communications and how to prepare field messages and they would learn to use the radios in planes. Their study of the weather would be worldwide and they would learn methods of weather forecast from data. All of the study would be related to flying. Clouds would be taken up and how clouds indicate weather and what forecasts can be made from clouds. There was little time and much to learn.

  Cadets in Advanced School go to their training planes, the At-9

  Joe studied thunderstorms and hurricanes and their effect on flying. In basic school the old enemy, ice, was studied, the hazard of ice formations on the wings that have pulled down many ships. They learned the use of de-icers, the inflatable rubber wing and tail edges which crack the ice off and drop it away. Basic training was an enlargement of primary training. In flight Joe made turns and climbs, glides, stalls, spins, spirals, 8’s, landings, and take-offs and forced landings, but now accuracy was demanded of him. He must be sure of his control of his ship. His spot landings must be perfect.

  In his basic school there was a great emphasis on instrument flying. Nearly three hours every week were devoted to flying by instruments alone. For this training advanced-type Army ships were used, faster and more powerful ships. At the end of nine weeks at basic school, Joe had seventy more hours of flying and fifteen hours on the Link trainer. He had learned to fly a ship in formation with other ships, had learned the signals of formation so that he could space his ship perfectly with the others. And during the last week at basic school he had had transition flying in an advanced trainer. The nine weeks were over and this was the grammar school of the air. Advanced school followed and now Joe felt less a flyer than he had after his first solo. He had begun to see the actual complication of flying well and how much must be learned.

  In elementary and basic school, airplanes alone had been the preoccupation, the flying of ships accurately from one place to another, keeping them out of trouble and maneuvering them. In advanced school the purpose of the military airplane began to emerge—attack and defense. Now, Joe studied not ships but military ships. Armament and attack became the main study. The history of pursuit aviation. The class studied Japanese and German pursuit and bombardment methods and their texts were the confidential reports on enemy ships in action. They studied the fighting techniques of the enemy and the methods of overcoming them and they learned our methods of attack, patrols, area protection, and strafing methods. Joe worked on pursuit formation and flight and squadron tactics. Night-fighting tactics were included with night landing systems, navigation at night, and methods of spotting enemy planes, barrage balloon and anti-aircraft guns. He learned about bombardment formation and tactical fire.

  In advanced school, cadets suddenly stopped being simply pilots and became fighting pilots. In addition to being a pilot Joe had to be a gunner too. In advanced school there was a gunnery course. He learned the care and stripping of machine guns, both the .30- and the .50-caliber. In pursuit, the pilot is gunner too. Joe studied gunnery much as a gunnery school taught it. He fired at moving targets and learned the laws of lead and distance.

  And now the class took up photograph interpretation and they learned the importance of rapid and accurate target identification and how to read aerial photographs. There came a new course in identification, the recognition of different types of naval units, again with models and silhouettes. Joe learned to identify battleships and battle cruisers, aircraft carriers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. He learned enemy craft and our own and those of our Allies.

  The instructor is ready to take the cadet on his first flight in an At-9

  At the end of his advanced school Joe and his class were commissioned. They were no longer cadets but lieutenants. The bars were on their shoulders now and the silver wings on their left breasts. The cap ornaments were changed from propeller and wings to the eagles of officers, but they were still students. Joe changed his living methods. He no longer lived in barracks and ate at the cadet mess. He shared a room in bachelor officers’ quarters and provided his own meals at officers’ club, or, if he wanted to pay for it, in cadet mess. But he had two more schools to go to before he would be a bomber pilot. He had to go to twin-motor school and to four-motor school. In bigger and more complicated ships he had to fly formations and practice missions in the big ships. He had to learn to use four throttles instead of one, and now that he was getting to be a real pilot he didn’t think very much about it. He was still a student and the work was constant. He was doing much more than learning a craft and a profession. He was growing into a way of life.

  His father wrote to him about the crops and about the Holstein twin calves that had been born. His brother wrote about his marriage and it seemed very remote to Joe. It is not very likely that when the war is over the four-motor pilots will go back to farms and businesses. They will be flying men permanently. The new dimension will be open to them. They will move the produce of the world. Flying will be so deep in them that they will not leave it. In a world which has left wheels for wings they will be the hearts and brains behind the wings. As no other group they will be needed when the war is over.

  In the squadron rooms now, they talk of flying and of flying problems. They talk with their hands, thumb against thumb and the fingers spread like wings. The hands are the ship and the little fingers are the ailerons. It is a characteristic gesture. They fly their hands while they talk. Joined hands make dives and climbing turns. There is a close fraternity among pilots and they have their own language and their own set of symbols. To have gone through the schools they must be very good, very intelligent and alert. They carry themselves with poise and confidence. When the four-motor school is finished, when they are at last four-motor bomber men, they fly the great ships—ships that cost a quarter of a million dollars to build and that have all the world knows about flying in their construction and their instrument boards. These men should be confident and proud, for their hands on controls and throttles hold also attack on the enemy and direct defense of the nation.

  Other branches of Army and Navy may have complicated actions and tactics designed to win a war, but for all the complication of his training the bomber man’s mission is very simple. He must find the enemy and destroy him, whether it be his factories, his troops, his supply lines, or his invasion ships. The history of the Army Air Force is very short. Ships were lost on the ground in the surprise at Pearl Harbor, it is true, but we have never lost an air battle; and on two occasions, in a war that is not yet a year old, the enemy has been met at sea with his strength of escorts and anti-aircraft and fighter planes. The big bombers have come in like avenging birds and they have left a broken, scattered, and distracted enemy. All over the country, in hundreds of schools, the young men are becoming pilots. Every day hundreds of new, raw young men are shivering with excitement when they climb into the little primary ships, and every day the finished pilots bring down the great bombers and are graduated to their final bomber stations. It is an endless business.

  Joe finished his four-motor school and he had a week of furlough. He thought he was very tired, that he would go back to the farm and eat and sleep for a week. He saw sacks of fertilizer in th
e barn and he saw the twin Holstein calves and the third day he was restless. Every flight of ships that went over the house made him step out to look at and to identify the ships. By ear he tried to call the type and number of ships by the sound of the motors. Before the week was done he was anxious to get back. If he had tried to explain it to himself, there was no one to talk flying to. Later perhaps he would take it easier, would find interests besides flying, but now he was a pilot first and everything else was secondary. He had a sense of elation when his week was up. He wasn’t leaving home—he was going home.

  THE AERIAL ENGINEER—CREW CHIEF

  Pilot, copilot, navigator, bombardier, gunner. There are two more vital members of a bomber crew, both specialists and experts. These are the aerial engineer and the radio operator. These two are technical sergeants, not commissioned officers, but in the bomber crew they have a standing out of all proportion to their stripes.

  The radio man is boss of communications and the engineer is the boss of the engines. As with other members of the crew the nation is fortunate in having a reservoir of men, mechanically-minded and with engine experience. It is not nearly so great a jump from Ford engines to the great power plants of the B-24 as it is from no engine to Ford engine. Training a man who has no experience at all with gasoline engines would be a long job and one which could not turn out experts quickly. But we have a wealth of partly trained men, garage mechanics who know gas engines inside out, high school graduates who have kept the motor running when it should have been dead.

  Engines are in the souls of our people. The crew chief will go to school in the Army, it is true, but he is better off if he has some experience with machines before he makes his application for school. Aerial engineers are drawn from the ranks of the Army, both enlisted and drafted men. Their questionnaires will have established whether they have some mechanical experience and their intelligence tests will indicate whether they are of the quality the Air Force insists upon.

  Air Force specifications for a crew chief are as follows: The nature of his duties—He flies with multi-engine bombers and transport planes and makes repairs and adjustments during flight; he substitutes for or helps the copilot in operation of flaps, raising and lowering landing gear, and other mechanical operations; he serves as aerial gunner during attack, supervises the ground maintenance of the ship to which he is assigned. He has gone to Army Air Force school for eighteen weeks and his training has included basic instructions in materials, care of equipment, electrical and shock, fundamental airplane structure, hydraulic systems and miscellaneous equipment, propellers, instruments, electrical systems, engines, fuel and oil systems, engine operation and tests, airplane inspection and maintenance with both single- and multi-engine planes. He may be eighteen to forty-four years old. If he is married, he must sign a statement that his dependents have sufficient means of support. He must have successfully completed the aircraft mechanics courses and have had experience in the mechanics on a bomber. He must have 20, 20 vision without glasses and no color blindness. His hearing must also be 20, 20. His height should be from 60 inches to 76 inches and his weight from 105 lbs. to 200 lbs., depending on how he is built. Although it is not necessary it would be valuable if the applicant for an aerial engineer has studied airplane mechanics, sheet metal, bench metal work, welding, woodworking, mechanical drawing, blueprint reading, pattern making, mathematics including the fundamental processes, equations and formulae, circular and angular measurements, scales, laying out geometrical figures and development, science, including the physical characteristics of materials used in aircraft construction and maintenance, and physical training.

  Washing down a Flying Fortress after a mission

  The crew chief directs the engine changes of a B-24

  These things are not required, but if the applicant has had some of them it will be much easier for him to go through the Air Force schools. In one sense the aerial engineer is the boss and the nursemaid of the bomber. His okay is necessary before the ship can take off, and the ship’s readiness to take off is his responsibility. While the pilot may know a good deal about the engines of the aircraft, the aerial engineer is the true expert and to him all references are submitted. He knows his ship from top to bottom, from propeller to tail. He has his own instrument board for reading the activities of his engines. If an engine should stagger or give trouble in flight he is able to make some repairs before landing.

  It is the crew chief, the aerial engineer, who keeps count of the hours on his engines, who directs their removal and replacement when they have fulfilled their time. The crew chief has a unique position in the ship, he is the recognized authority in his field. He has a second duty in action. If the ship is attacking or is attacked, he becomes a gunner. He has been trained to operate the machine gun and he takes his place in the defense of the ship. These are the things a crew chief is supposed to do, but ordinarily he can do much more. It is no unusual thing in our Air Force for a crew chief to be able to fill any position in the ship in an emergency. He has been known to pilot, to navigate, and to bomb. He is that kind of restless intelligent man who learns from anything he touches. The pilot depends upon him greatly, depends upon his judgment and upon his knowledge.

  In nearly every small town in America there is a garage run by a natural mechanic. He has usually graduated from high school, and even while he was in school he has repaired automobiles. Such a one was Abner. In his second year in high school he bought two abandoned model T Fords, and using the frame of one, engine block of the other, two wheels from each, he put together a car that would run. But once it was running he was not satisfied, he tinkered with the carburetor until it ran on practically no gasoline. He cut off the fenders and soldered a bullet-shaped body together. For two years he had the car and it was never the same two days in a row. And before he was through he had a fast, smooth-running automobile. Even in high school people sent for him to make little repairs on their cars. He took a correspondence school course in automobile mechanics. When he was out of high school he had already a group of customers and so he opened a little garage in an abandoned blacksmith’s shop, dug his own pit and, for that matter, using the repaired blacksmith’s forge, made many of his own tools, some of which were more efficient than the ones you buy. Everyone has known a mechanic like Abner, long chin, muscular body, gray eyes, straight blond hair. People trusted Abner to do anything, he was a wizard with an automobile. His bills were reasonable and fair. When he had little work to do he made tools and played with an engine and put it together. He never had time to be married but thought he would someday, if he thought of it at all. His hands, cracked from gasoline and oil, were curiously delicate and his fingers were deft. Boys brought their broken bicycles to Abner to be welded and once he built in a few hours a homemade iron lung for a child suffering from infantile paralysis—and it worked too.

  A crew chief readies the tail guns of a Flying Fortress for a gunnery mission

  When a customer brought a car to Abner’s dark garage he usually stayed around a while to watch the work, for the mechanic personalized his work. He talked to motors, questioned them. He started the motors and listened and he could tell a great deal about a motor by listening to it. It is doubtful whether Abner had much ambition for money or position. He studied constantly, but it wasn’t really study. He just wanted to know about mechanical things. When Abner enlisted in the Army, a month after war was declared, his little community in California was upset. Who would repair bicycles? To whom could you take a car and know it would get the best treatment? Who would make a carrying brace so that you could put a canoe on top of a sedan? A customer asked Abner why he had enlisted. Abner wasn’t much for such talk. He said helplessly, “Well, we’ve got a war and—you know they’re putting 2,000-horsepower motors in those big bombers? God almighty, I’d like to see those engines.”

  He enlisted in the Army and questionnaires and tests moved him to the Air Force; and hard as the work was it is doubtful if Abner ever had a b
etter time in his life than at the Army schools. Here for the first time he had the finest engines in the world to play with. He had that certainty in his work which is called authority and he was early slated to be a crew chief. He had confidence in his ability and he gave everyone else confidence in him. On the ground he got his corporal’s stripes and then he began to work on the ships and he became a sergeant.

  He was bound to be an aerial engineer, a crew chief. He was the proper kind of man for the job. Given work to do in the air it is doubtful whether he would be aware of it being off the ground. His careful hands and good eyes made him an expert gunner. And besides all this he commanded instant respect as a crew chief must. He wanted to know things. He studied navigation in his spare time and he copiloted ships occasionally. Abner is no ideal figure. He is the best possible kind of a crew chief, but he is not an uncommon man. He is, however, primarily and almost uniquely an American kind of a man. Nearly every town has its Abner. The children know him and the boys with their old cars ask his advice. He is a simple man as a good scientist must be. He is a humble man but he will take no nonsense from anyone.